Talk:Musical Editor

scales and such

I have posted a question about the Musical Editor on the "Ask a question" page of the OLPC project, about which kind of music systems that are used for the Musical Editor. It seems that CSound software is used for generating the music. While checking the CSound website, I saw that they have a lot of samples for different instruments, different kinds of music but I didn't see anything about different music systems: CSound files are using the hard coded frequencies of the different notes (don't enter 'la', but enter 440 Hz and so on). I wonder how the Musical Editor is handling the translation of the note names into frequencies ('do', 're' ... into ± 520 Hz, ± 590 Hz) and if this is extensible to music systems and their corresponding note names as they are used in some third world countries.

Fixed frequencies cover most systems. It'd be nice to also support a purely ratio-controlled system, where a given note is an exact simple ratio relative to some other note in the recent past. Probably the ratios should be restricted such that numerator and denominator have no common factors and no prime factors greater than 7.

-edit by another contributor- yes - from the wikipedia.org page on microtonal music: "By this definition, the following systems are not microtonal: a diatonic scale in any meantone tuning; much Indonesian gamelan music; and Thai, Burmese, and African music which use 7 approximately equally spaced tones in each (approximate) octave." - there should be a module in csound for microtonal music: the most sensible option would be to have a special settings page to configure a preset choice of tunings for different regions to fit with preferred choice of tuning for the region. to eliminate locally tuned music would be an ethical crime, and is a big risk with a music program dictating that users have a 'western scale' for their music. i would not like OLPC to be responsible for the destruction of some of the most musically interesting and unique styles of music simply because there was no option for local tunings in the easily available and (relatively) powerful sequencing capabilities of freely available computers. it looks like Csound’s value converters for microtonal programming are functions "ampdb" and "cpspch". (found on www.csounds.com/chapter1/index.html )

Musical Editor 1,3 incompatible with G1G1 version?

I download Musical Editor 1.3 and installed it with no problems. I see the activity listed in the bottom of the home view. I can launch it and get the pulsing "EM" icon. But when the activity is fully launched, the screen goes completely blank.

The version of OLPC software that I'm using is (as reported by uname -a: 2.6.22-20071121.7.olpc.af3dd731d18bc39 ; I got the laptop via the Give-one-get-one-program. I know my way around a command line, but I'm not a Linux guru. Any ideas?